'Walking Dead' recap: Rick and company return in 'The Suicide King'

The Walking Dead bowed out of 2012 with the shocking, brutal and absolutely fantastic 'Made to Suffer' and we pick up here exactly where we left off - the Dixon brothers are reunited but find themselves at the mercy of a crowd baying for blood....

Andrea (Laurie Holden), who's been a useless wet blanket for much of this third season, continues to be an utterly useless bystander, so it's up to Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and company to save the Dixons with an armed assault.

His dark fury barely contained, the Governor (David Morrissey) takes powerful strides through his devastated city, now ready for war - The Walking Dead took the time to develop the Governor properly in 2012, but with a new year comes a new man and it's wonderful to see David Morrissey finally get to play the role of arch-villain.

Even once they're free, Rick's gang faces internal conflicts - Michonne (Danai Gurira), Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) all have it in for Merle over his association with The Governor, while Daryl is desperate to defend his brother and Rick himself is struggling to rein in his emotional and exhausted friends.

Daryl ultimately decides to leave the prison gang rather than abandon Merle a second time - we know his absence will only be temporary, but less Daryl can only be a bad thing so let's hope that The Walking Dead's most eminent bad-ass isn't MIA for too long.

One character possibly looking to fill Daryl's bloodied boots is Glenn, who was seriously under-utilised in the first half of season three. There's hints in 'The Suicide King' that he may be undergoing a significant transformation, his vicious zombie stomp perhaps implying that his traumatic experiences at the prison have had a permanent, damaging effect on his psyche.

Glenn - once one of Rick's staunchest supporters - is now questioning his leadership, along with his surrogate father Hershel, which doesn't bode well. Indeed, few of the threats that present themselves in 'The Suicide King' are external - Rick's group is crumbling from within and the addition of new 'insiders' - Tyreese's gang - only complicates matters further.

We met Tyreese (Chad L Coleman) only briefly in 'Made to Suffer' but here we get to know him a little better - he's a decent man and a strong, confident leader, at this point stronger than Rick. I suspect he might present the biggest threat yet to Rick's leadership.

And that might not be a bad thing for the rest of the troops, given that, any time the adrenaline stops pumping, Rick slips back into a dark, depressive and delusional state, haunted by sights and sounds of his dead wife. In this week's final scenes, Andrew Lincoln knocks it out of the park once again as Rick's delirium comes dangerously close to putting all of his 'family' at risk.

Woodbury is facing a similar crisis on a larger scale as its citizens rise up, determined to fend for themselves in the aftermath of recent events. But the Governor's done playing nice and Andrea's forced to rediscover a little of her former fire as she finally, *finally* stands up to her demented lover and takes charge of the community. Good on you, girl.

Overall, 'The Suicide King' is good, but not great. The Walking Dead cast - particularly Andrew Lincoln - remain excellent and ably bring Evan Reilly's script to life, but the brief opening siege aside, there's a disappointing lack of action and glorious gore. The end result is solid but unspectacular and after a two-month hiatus, I'd been expecting a little more epic from The Walking Dead's return.